The Fortress of Solitude (38 page)

Meantime something good was happening over at the sink, a sizzled stink, a smell with promise. It buoyed him immediately, made him want to sing.

“Don’t immolate yourself in some Richard Pryor deal, now, Horatio. Get that pipe loaded up and bring it here. And pick some music, Desmond, you good-for-nothing flunky. Gonna write you a theme song,
Good-fo-nuthin’ flunky man, he can’t book me a gig I bet somebody else can
—”

Perhaps motivated to stop Barrett’s improvisation Desmond at last picked a new record. Prince’s
For You
, nothing too grating.

If Barry wasn’t looming in size like a bloated planet, Horatio and Desmond and Mingus and the girls all tiny and floating in orbit around him, everything would be fine.

“Desmond, I ever tell you about how this feeling comes on me, like I’m getting bigger while everyone else is getting small?”

“Nah, man.” Desmond sounded baffled.

“We all gonna be gettin’
small
,” said Horatio. “Nothin’ wrong with that.”

“My former wife the mother of this boy here used to tell me I was getting
grandiose
, but there’s nothin’ grand about it. Just at times I feel like my fingertips is a thousand miles away.”

“
Crazy
, man,” said Desmond, afraid of saying anything specific or controversial.

“Yeah, crazy,” said Barrett Rude Junior, seeing the futility in trying to explain. “It’s some crazy shit all right. Yo, give the kid his present, ’Ratio.”

“What?”

“Don’t play like you don’t remember.” His voice crept from within the tomb of his chest and made its way into space, where the curvature of his own ears retrieved and confirmed it. He trusted that he’d actually spoken.

Eyes widened, Horatio came from behind the kitchen counter and reached in his inner vest pocket for the slip of folded foil, the gift he might have been unsure Barrett Rude Junior wasn’t joking about. He’d prepared it anyway: never could have too much product on you, partying with Barry.

“They you go. A gram of your own. You don’t have to go jumping out no trees now.”

Mingus only stared.

“That’s for you, take it. You want a line now Horatio cut you up some of his.”

Mingus slipped the packet into his baggy thigh pocket and shook his head.

“Happy Birthday. You a man now.”

Then Barrett Rude Junior, swimming back inside himself, his voice and mind more and more a speck within the sea of his body, saw the gift was incomplete. Sure Mingus was ungrateful, he should be. The gram wasn’t enough. His father had to give him the girl, Yolanda. Barry had no use for her himself, not tonight with these brick-heavy limbs. The girl would be crushed if he somehow mounted her. And if she offered him head she’d be undetectable, miles off, beneath the horizon of the real. Tonight was the boy’s turn.

“Horatio, you done already? Bring me the pipe because I swear like Old King Cole I’m too damn
lazy
get out this chair. Hey, Yolanda?”

“Yes?” she said, surprised to be named by him now, a bit prim.

“How’d you like to go downstairs and check out Gus’s crib?”

He’d spoken easily, like she’d know his thinking, one thing flowing from the next. But nobody else saw the essential grace of the handoff, father to son. They all got on him at once.

Yolanda said, “What’s
that
supposed to mean?” She didn’t leave the couch, but crossed her legs, guarding the prize, and angled her body resentfully to the door.

“That’s fucked up, Barrett,” said Mingus in a low and pitying tone.

“Barry, be cool,” added Horatio, like he had any say in this house.

“I don’t
mean
anything, relax y’all. Damn. What if I make you a bet, though? How old are you, little Yo-
landa
? If you’re closer to his age than mine, what about you go downstairs? Do a few lines of birthday blow with my son, it’s only fair.”

“She can’t,” said Mingus flatly.

“Wait up, Gus, let’s hear from the girl. What about it, baby? Year of the Dragon or Rat or what?”

“You’re a sweet-looking man, Mingus,” said Yolanda defiantly, refusing to look at Barrett. Her voice was layered with sex, mothering, other mystical woman shit meant to shame Barry and let him know what he’d missed. For he’d missed it, blown it, she was gone. “Don’t let your father ruin your birthday for you. I’ll come see your room if you want.”

But Mingus ignored her. “She can’t come downstairs,” he said again.

“Why is that?” said Barry.

“Senior’s in the front. I heard him in there.”

“He snuck back in?”

“What you expect? You didn’t take his key.”

Barry was resigned to the world-feeling now. This was how it felt: he’d become a planet and his population swarmed like gnats, flitting in and out of sight. So his old man was back, the skulker! Senior’d done something to get himself in bad with the pimps and dealers running the Times Plaza Hotel, talked some girl into his room and tried to baptize her, or maybe just fulminated too long in the lobby—anyhow, got himself unwelcomed, then crept back here to the basement. Mingus and Senior were two of a kind, creatures ungrateful by nature and grown as remote from him as his own distant hands. Horatio, Desmond, son, father, pussy, gold records, all flew in a cloud, godforsaken and tinny.

What he needed was a hit on the pipe. A line or two lines or a dozen wasn’t going to do it tonight, wasn’t going to shrink his unendurable weight or expand the other inhabitants of the room from irritant size.

Outside, rain misting on the day-baked tar.

Pipe, bowl, and be
damn
sure the Fiddlers Three don’t weasel themselves a co-writer’s credit.

It was the fact that the venue was the New School, a name he associated with pinkish causes and the hiring of scantily credentialed professors, which had beguiled him to committing this mistake. That and the Dutch collector of original paperback art who’d enthused through his telephone a half-dozen times until Abraham relented. Perhaps also some morbid curiosity to encounter his colleagues: one Howard Zingerman and one Paul Pflug, incredible as the names might seem. Likely his own name
Ebdus
struck others the same way and it was the oddness of their monikers which had caused them to drift into this enterprise. Perhaps Abraham had accepted out of vanity. Certainly vanity. The term
pop culture
, thrown around so freely by the Dutchman. He was pop culture now. So let him go and see what that meant and let him meet Zingerman and Pflug. What harm to sit on a panel?

Well, he’d learned what harm, what cost to be baited out of hiding. The New School auditorium was no insurance against humiliation. The small crowd, fewer than fifty, nearly all of them lurching males with complex facial hair, had come expressly to meet Pflug. Pflug was himself perhaps thirty, had a long ponytail like many of his admirers, and appeared to be a weight lifter, though he also wore the wispy beard of an old man, or possibly a wizard.

Pflug worked in the style which had succeeded Abraham’s in time and overwhelmed it in popularity. That was, if Abraham’s style had in fact ever enjoyed any real popularity except with art directors, who had for a few years vied to hire Abraham himself and, when he proved unavailable, commissioned bald imitations of his work. This no longer happened. Though Abraham still worked, the vogue for arty psychedelia was done. Pflug was typical of what replaced it. He painted dragons and strongmen in the fashion of the posters of certain recently popular films, his skies full of billowy Maxfield Parrish clouds, his barbarians and gladiatrixes and even his dragons rendered with a uniform photorealist gloss, down to each feather and scale, down to each blond, blow-dried strand of their anachronistic haircuts.

In fact, it became clear it
was
Pflug who’d created the poster for one of the recently popular films. This explained the resemblance, and also the existence of his fans. They’d barely concealed their impatience through the brief panel, waiting for the chance to mob Pflug with posters, now reverently uncurled from cardboard tubes, which they hoped he’d autograph. No one here cared about paperback cover art, and why should they? It wasn’t a thing to care about.

The exception was the Dutchman who’d single-handedly organized this event, God help him, coming from Amsterdam to do so. And it was Zingerman he cared about, exclusively. The Dutchman, younger than Pflug even, was clean-cut and shaven. He’d sounded older on the phone, but in person was soft-spoken, dumbstruck with reverence. Zingerman was his hero. He’d been buying Zingerman originals from the warehouses of defunct paperback houses, from thieving art directors, from catalogues which circulated among aficionados like himself. The Dutchman was authoring a monograph, a catalogue raisoné, and sought Zingerman’s blessing. His Atlantic crossing should have been a direct pilgrimage to the feet of his master but he’d been shy, it now seemed, and so had arranged this whole sham panel, Zingerman-Pflug-Ebdus, “The Hidden World of Paperback Art,” as a blind.

Zingerman the painter had a certain integrity, a kind of Ashcan school realism. He was painterly in the mood of the Soyer brothers, or, if you were generous, even the earliest Philip Guston. Zingerman’s milieu was urban gothic, characters caught at heights of expressive torment, men tearing shirts from women and vice versa, but also moments of tenderness or even pensiveness. Small dogs and rusted cans lay in the gloom of Faulknerian porches. The women were only always a tad beautiful, Playboy bunnies in disarray, slumming. Hands, faces, and cleavages were all in clean focus, while much else was lost in chiaroscuro, a signature style which also saved man-hours and was surely far less wearing than Pflug’s autistic micro-detail in the long run.

The examples on hand, books sealed in protective plastic sleeves and two of the paintings themselves, were all from the Dutchman’s collection. The titles spanned four decades, from the forties, Paul Bowles and Hortense Calisher beside outright pornography—Zingerman’s treatment was consistent. He’d conceded to the seventies only his sfumato palette of grays and browns, brightening his tones and adding
Laugh-In
-style paisley bikinis and unbuttoned print shirts to his girls’ wardrobes, fluffy sideburns to his protagonists’ clenched jaws.

Zingerman the human? He was toxic. Maybe seventy, he stooped from a basketballer’s height, his enormous frame draped in a dust-colored suit and folded awkwardly behind the table they shared. Hair sprouted from his French-cuffed sleeves like he wore an ape suit beneath, but the skin of his hands and face was papery, drained of vitality. Against the auditorium’s posted prohibitions he chain-smoked cigars thick as his clubby fingers. He coughed frequently around the cigars. Hard to picture those fingers with a brush—but then so many things were hard to picture and yet
were
, like this evening’s occasion.

Zingerman wanted no part of Pflug, and barely seemed to tolerate the Dutchman, his Boswell. Perhaps they lay beyond some age requisite for Zingerman’s attention. As Pflug autographed posters—another artistic task he handled in excruciating detail, lavishing each with cartoons and inscriptions—Zingerman stretched in his chair, offered Abraham a cigar, and wholesaled his life’s philosophy.

“Lay the girls.”

“Sorry?”

Zingerman’s voice was graveled and abrupt and possibly Abraham had mistaken a baroque cough for speech.

“Lay the girls, every one of them.” Zingerman gestured at the paperbacks on the table before them, then back at the large originals hung on the curtain. “The models. That was my only consolation for staying in this dirty stinking business, and that’s why I can’t fathom a guy like you goes on painting these whatever-you-calls, geodesic forms. What are you, going to lay a geodesic form? That’s a lonely road.”

“Your models? You took them to bed?”

“To the bed, to the couch, right in the middle of the room with a leopard-skin outfit, in a mermaid costume, with fake fangs, with a toy gun in their hands, with paint all over my fingers, lay them, lay them, lay them. Strict policy. Hire the boy, hire the girl, arrange the pose, snap Polaroids, send the boy home, give with an excuse to start touching the outfit, fix the collar, hand on the ass, lay the girl, lay the girl, lay the girl, thirty-five years.”

“Like Picasso,” was all Abraham could think to say.

“You bet your ass. I couldn’t bear to paint those pictures any other way, I’d put my head in the stove. I tried telling my friend Schrooder, he thinks I’m joking. I’m not joking. You a married man?”

“I was.”

“We all were. These kids have no idea. That one there? You think he lays them? He’s too busy painting hair, painting feathers, painting the shine on bubbles. If I got one of those girls with the swords and the hair in my room I’d know what to do. Him, see those arms? I think he’s looking harder at the boys.”

“Or the dragons.”

“Or the dragons. So you, what? You screw forms? At least Picasso started real. After he laid them both eyes were on one side. He made them walk funny. You, it’s like looking in a microscope. You’re not lonely, just you and your germs?”

Abraham thought: ladies and germs. Which was pretty much Zingerman’s vintage. So this was what it came to, Ebdus the bridge between Ashcan school schlock and photorealist dragons, a momentary interlude. Just him and his germs.

No, the film would not be discussed here, the film would not be considered, not be thought of.

“I’m lonely,” he said honestly.

“Of course you are, you stink of it.”

“A big career mistake, biomorphism.”

“Now you’re talking. Take a leaf from my book,” said Zingerman. “Live. Lay the girls.”

“I will.”

Here Zingerman lowered his voice, to conclude the lesson, to share what he’d earned, what he really knew. “Look,” he said. “Don’t tell Schrooder.”

“Yes?”

“
Riddled
.” He passed his cigar magically over the length of his body.

“Sorry?”

“Started lung, so they cut lung. Doesn’t matter where it started. Gone lymph, gone brain, gone bloodstream.”